James Joyce's Finnegans Wake: incomprehensibility, plurality of meanings and proximity to poetry

Abstract

The present paper has the objective of putting into discussion the language of the work Finnegans Wake (1939) by the Irish author James Joyce, pondering it through the concept of the “lacking word”, as expressed by George Steiner in After Babel, as the defining feature of Western poetic production after the decade of 1870, evident at first especially in the poems of Rimbaud and Mallarmé, where the difficulty offered by the text to the reader is of an order different than that of the entire literature previously produced. To this notion we articulated that of Eco's “open work” and the contrasts between poetical and ideological language, as defined by George Steiner, Terry Eagleton and Stewart Curran, present in germ ever since English Romanticism's second moment in Percy Bysshe Shelley (Prometheus Unbound, 1820) and his “humanist apocalypse”. Joyce, as a novelist, is often seen in opposition to Mallarmé, a poet, pronouncer of the aphorism of “purifying the words of the tribe” as the duty of the poet, worn down and emptied of their meaning by daily use. However, when compared to other novelists of the same period, like William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, 1929, As I Lay Dying, 1930), and even with his own previous production (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, 1916, Ulysses, 1922), in many aspects, Joyce, in his work with Wake's language, goes beyond that of the novel's prose and the adaptation of literary technique to mimetic representation. Thus, he comes closer to poetic language, using techniques already referred to as “mots-valises”, “puns” or “ideograms” and reading keys supplied by the text itself to generate meanings from such words, in a type of freedom regarding meaning attribution by the reader based on incomplete communication, limited almost only by the rigid structure of the text.